Personal Structures: Open Borders: parallel exhibition of Venice Biennale

Emotion in Space seeks to re-imagine ways in which global real- time datasets can give us a unique perspective on the understanding of world motion through emotional currents emanating from 3200 different cities. Part of the Mechanics of Emotions series, this new work is a poetical representation of the ‘human factor’, comparing human affects with stock market data, forming part of the artist’s running critique on preeminent forms of data quantification.
In this interactive work, clouds of the world’s emotions rise from the cities, forming a spiral nebula around the earth. We move our hands around a virtual globe, mixing multiple streams of real-time emotional data translated into waves of sound. As we move towards each city- source however, the sound becomes that of a crowd, distinguishing the unique emotional character of the different conurbations. When further from earth, the emotion sounds dissolve into space with unlikely reverberations. On the projection screen, the visitor sees the globe in his or her own hands, which can delicately stroke human kind’s emotion clouds, uncovering the dynamic of the ‘World Nervous System’.
The finance industry was the first to benefit from the big data revolution, and as such, the art of governing the city has moved from the civic to the financial. Utilizing huge swathes of real-time online data news, this work reconfigures the notion of worldwide data towards the emotions of people in cities, translating their Internet data into an ad-hoc symphony of sound. In doing so, the work reveals how the emotional sensitivity of the planet might be the engine at the origin of political and economic mutations, or how, vice versa, these economic mutations might provoke deeper human emotional responses. This translation between human affects and the markets, and the work’s merging of the real and the fictitious is part of what the artist, Maurice Benayoun, calls ‘Critical Fusion’.
Stages of the emotional streams Flows of the world’s emotions rise and mutate when in contact with the real winds. Images from ‘Emotion Winds’ series, an on-screen precursor to Emotion in Space.
Emotion in Space is an interactive Internet-based installation playing with data streams, inviting visitors to collectively manipulate the world’s emotions rising in streams and clouds, emanating from 3200 of the largest cities around the globe, the visitor playing the resulting spiral nebula with the fingertips, as if conducting a galactic orchestra.